America`s Classic Seeds Sprout Again

April 14, 1985|By William Aldrich.

Give me a packet of tomato seeds with about eight letters following the name, and I`ll fall for it in a minute. Each of the letters means the variety has been bred to be resistant to a certain menace, any one of which may be present in my garden. If there are enough letters, I tell myself, it must be impossible to fail with the plants.

Each season new varieties are introduced as ``improvements`` over the older varieties. Almost without fail, these introductions are hybrids, in most cases involving intense inbreeding of parent stocks to arrive at a variety that gives what is termed in the trade ``hybrid vigor``--more vegetable per square foot or correcting whatever is deemed undesirable in the species`

growth pattern.

Hybrids are marvels of the post-World War II era and have been a boon to seed producers as well as home gardeners and commercial growers. Whether today`s plants are superior to those grown in a grandparent`s garden depends on whom you consult. One thing is certain, however: hybrids cost more than standard varieties. A recent article in Country Journal magazine cited the cost of a pound of nonhybrid broccoli seeds at about $12, while the new hybrid variety sold for $170.

What hybrid seed means to the home gardener is that we can`t chop open a hybrid tomato, wash off the seeds, dry and store them and expect to attain the same tomato the next year. The genetic makeup of a hybrid will not produce true to variety because the ``hybrid vigor`` created in that cross will not be present in the offspring`s seeds. They usually revert to one of their parental forms if saved and grown the next season. We are forced to buy new seeds every year, which is obviously economically sustaining for the seed merchant.

Our grandparents worked with seeds as they knew them at the time, which are now referred to as ``open pollinated`` (hybridization was done haphazardly by nature) or standard varieties. Those down-through-the-ge nerations seeds are referred to as family heirloom varieties.

``Until the 1940s, it was common to save your own seed,`` says Kent Whealy, who for the last 10 years has sought to preserve varieties that are being dropped from seed catalogues in favor of hybridized ``improvements.``

Whealy`s Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit organization run out of his home in Decorah, Ia., works to save heirloom and commercially unavailable vegetable seeds from extinction.

``As people came here from overseas, they brought with them the best of their seeds,`` giving a wide range of varieties that over the years attained colorful, if not always descriptive, names.

You can almost hear the wistfulness in Whealy`s voice when he talks about Howling Mob sweet corn, which went the way of many varieties when the family- owned Shumway Seedsman Co. in Rockford, Ill., was sold a few years ago. New management dropped Howling Mob corn, Abraham Lincoln tomatoes and other standard varieties in favor of varieties more widely known to the general gardening audience, he said.

``People wrote to me and were really distressed,`` that they could no longer find a source for the seeds they had planted for many years, Whealy said. The company (still known by the same name) has been sold again and the newest management is promising to restore many of the open pollinated varieties, according to Whealy.

``We`ve seen a tremendous consolidation in the seed industry in the last few years with agri-chemical conglomerates buying out the family-owned companies and dropping their collection of seeds that were in many instances regionally adapted and replacing them with hybrids and patented varieties,``

Whealy said.

Whealy has been preaching his gospel for 10 years and has built a collection of sources for endangered varieties of 2,000 beans, 600 tomatoes, 200 squashes, 100 corn, 100 potatoes and smaller numbers of other vegetables. He acts as a conduit, relying on home gardeners to regenerate stocks of disappearing varieties and linking them up with subscribers seeking those seeds through a growers network.

The renewed interest in preservation led Martha De Young to incorporate the concept into one of the beds she is creating at the Chicago Botanic Garden`s fruit and vegetable garden. Still under construction, the 3.8-acre island garden will open June 23 and her progress will be chronicled in the weekly Cook`s Garden series. De Young said that people ask about the old varieties and ``we think it will be good for the children--these varieties were good then and are still being grown.``

Among the varieties that she will grow are the orginal green bell pepper, Bullnose, that dates to 1795; Kentucky Wonder string bean (1864), Iceberg lettuce (1894), Dwarf Grey sugar pea (1892), and Yellow Pear tomato (1888). All 45 varieties are still available commercially, which was the point of the plot, De Young said--to be able to provide a list of sources where people can buy them.